Just because it works in the United States, doesn’t mean it will work in China. It’s a lesson some of our biggest tech brands have learned the hard way. And as Groupon attempts expands east, critics say its already making the same mistakes. Read more »
Lot18, the membership-only daily deals website for high end wine, is set to expand into three new product categories: food, epicurean travel, and spirits. Lot18 will start rolling out the new verticals, starting with food, within the next several weeks, CEO Philip James tells me. Read more »
Groupon and LivingSocial dominate the burgeoning market for email daily deals, but the landscape could change quickly as those models expand to the much more complex world of mobile. Here’s what coupon distributors need to keep in mind as they target mobile users. Read more »
Descuento Libre is a daily deal site catering to Latinos in the United States. While Groupon emphasis new adventures, this year-old site is staking a claim with family-friendly activities and household goods and services and a different model for attracting businesses. Read more »
Will huge returns on social media investments — like Groupon, LinkedIn or Pandora — help make up for underperforming greentech investments in a venture firm’s portfolio? If so, perhaps this gives firms time — and wiggle room — to keep up their cleantech investing. Read more »
Pandora has boosted the price it plans to charge for its stock, a move that likely has a lot to do with the frenzy of interest in tech issues following the Groupon IPO — but will that rising tide of enthusiasm lift all boats, or swamp them? Read more »
Groupon’s prospectus for an IPO started arguments over the company’s huge losses. Silicon Valley wants Groupon to look like a technology company, but right now it’s more or less in the Yellow Pages business. But by better applying big data analysis, Groupon could start seeing profits. Read more »
Digital coupon company Coupons.com has closed on a $200 million funding round. About half of this round will be used to provide liquidity to early investors and employees at the 13-year-old company, and the rest will be put toward meeting growing demand, CEO Steven Boal said. Read more »
With an IPO in the cards, two of Groupon’s co-founders are already cashing in on its success. Now they plan to use their money to build a generation of companies that can mimic Groupon’s tactic of using people — not technology — to grow. Read more »
Among those debating the value of Groupon as it filed for its hotly-awaited initial public offering were two startup entrepreneurs — 37signals partner David Heinemeier Hansson, who argued it is doomed to fail, and SimpleGeo founder Joe Stump, who looked on the bright side. Read more »
Groupon’s hotly-awaited initial stock offering will either stand as a beacon of hope to technology and Internet stocks of all kinds, or as a giant warning sign indicating a huge bubble of irrational exuberance. The company’s prospectus contains plenty of evidence for both sides. Read more »
Just months after raising $950 million, Groupon has filed for an IPO as it looks to stay ahead of a gaggle of competitors in the daily deal market. The company faces challenges in its high user acquisition cost and expansion into local and mobile. Read more »
Markets with network effects tend to have explosive growth, and part of the excitement driving LinkedIn’s IPO last week comes from investors associating social media with that principle. But assessing the competitive positions of social media companies depends on knowing which network effects are actually present. Read more »
Alexander the Great set his own warships ablaze just to send the message there was no turning back. Two thousand years later, SCVNGR founder Seth Priebatsch doesn’t want to take over the world — he just wants to “build game layers” on top of it. Read more »
![GNow Groupon Purchase[16]](http://gigaom2.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/gnow-groupon-purchase16-e1305863809434.png?w=210&h=140&crop=1)
The next step for location-based service is discount offers that find you where you are, something we’re starting to see more and more. The latest example is a new partnership between Groupon and Loopt, which will bring Groupon Now limited time offer alerts to Loopt users. Read more »
Merchants have been able to tap the power of collective buying through start-ups like Groupon. Now, online retailers are poised to start leveraging the power of social commerce with the help of group gift buying start-ups that are integrating gifting widgets on their sites. Read more »
As more businesses switch on to the possibilities of social media, a battle is brewing between the tools that help them do it best. Faced with stiff competition, Chicago-based Sprout Social has a simple strategy: fight back by building great products. Read more »
Groupon is investigating the case of a Seattle man who was able to log into another user’s account using Facebook Connect. The issue could be an isolated incident or could suggest some larger sloppiness on the part of fast-growing Groupon. Read more »
LinkedIn is upping its expectations for its much-anticipated IPO, which it now believes can pull in as much as $274 million. The company this morning released the pricing for its IPO and is now prepared to offer 7.84 million shares at $32 to $35 each Read more »
Last week, Facebook formally announced “Hackamonth,” an internal initiative that allows some engineers to leave their team to work on a side project of their choosing. The goal is to prevent burnout among the staff and should result in some cool new products. Read more »
More than almost any other national brand, the Gap has been on the cutting edge with its marketing trials, working with Facebook, Groupon, Foursquare, Visa, JiWire and others to figure out how to craft its image and message for a much more social and mobile audience. Read more »
An ex-Facebooker is looking to clip the multi-billion-dollar, daily-deals industry where it hurts by *gasp* putting local businesses back in control of their own discount destiny. Groupon and assorted clones, meet thruSocial: the first “self-serve” media advertising and deals platform for consumer businesses. Read more »
We have only just taken first steps towards what is real (online) social commerce. Ex-Googler and current Facebook product manager articulates this in a must-read presentation, How Your Customers’ Social Circles Influence What They Buy, What They Do and Where They Go. Take a look. Read more »
Spiceworks has raised a $25 million fourth round of funding from Adams Capital and Tenaya Capital to continue building out a community of IT professionals that use the Spiceworks software to monitor their companies’ networks. That community is like a Facebook for IT. Read more »
Russia’s biggest Internet company, Mail.ru, has made its financial results public for the first time — and in doing so has revealed that despite relatively slim profits, it holds as much as $2 billion of hot technology companies such as Facebook and Groupon Read more »
Facebook’s new Deals offering may or may not become a “Groupon killer,” but the social network has two major weapons in its arsenal that others do not: One is the power of the site’s social graph, and the other is the integration of Facebook Credits. Read more »
ChoozOn, a start-up co-founded by a trio of former Yahoo executives, is launching a social network built around shopping and personalized deals that works hard to bring brands and consumers together. It will face tough odds going up against Groupon, Facebook, Google and others. Read more »
Four months after Groupon turned down Google’s $6 billion buyout offer, the search giant appears to have built what it couldn’t buy. The company has begun rolling out Google Offers, a new discount offer service that seems to be created in the mold of Groupon. Read more »
The most interesting part about yesterday’s announcement that Groupon is using the Cloudera Distribution of Hadoop wasn’t the actual use but, rather, the insight that Groupon is “building a world-class infrastructure” of which Hadoop will be a key part. But recruiting big-data-savvy talent is getting rather pricey. Read more »
If the first phase of e-commerce was the utilitarian hunt for staples, the next phase of e-commerce is about recreational shopping. So it needs to be a more fun and social experience which gives an edge to companies that encourage deeper social experiences. Read more »
Groupon is buying Pelago, maker of local discovery app Whrrl, signaling the end of the check-in service. But it could also mean a broader direction for Groupon as it looks to expand beyond daily deals to more localized and personalized discounts. Read more »
The first quarter of 2011 saw plenty of competition between various web companies — and some heated tension, too. Content farms generated the most debate, with Demand Media’s IPO attracting attention and controversy and Google making a major change to its ranking algorithm. Facebook, meanwhile, maintained its heavyweight status online, but this time the social network’s impact was centered on social search, unified communications and comment systems. And Facebook’s ongoing dominance raised the question, Is there room for more than one social network? If niche networks like Quora and Color are any indication, the answer is “yes.” Additional companies mentioned in this report include Twitter, Groupon, Microsoft, LinkedIn and MySpace. To see the full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Facebook is planning to roll out a new version of its Deals feature soon, and the fact that this Groupon-style service will be integrated directly into a user’s news feed will make it even more obvious that Groupon and its competitors aren’t really all that social. Read more »
Cleantech is losing its mojo to upstarts peddling coupons. These days, it’s not hard to find tech companies, investors and market analysts comparing cleantech to Groupon, which generated a lot of buzz when it turned down a reportedly $5-6 billion offer from Google late last year. Read more »
Hadoop has been used by large web companies for applications such as search engines, but the reality is that the project is so much more. This report takes a closer look, examining what Hadoop is (and isn’t), who’s doing what to productize it and why we can expect to see the market pick up serious steam in 2011. We profile the growing number of companies — from startups like MapR to Cloudera, the arguable leader in the space — using Hadoop, the challenges still hindering widespread adoption and where potential users can expect the market to go as we move through 2011 and beyond. Companies mentioned in this report include Yahoo, Facebook, EMC, Teradata and Appistry. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Facebook confirmed it’s working on a Groupon-inspired discount service that will help bring together merchants and its 600 million users. But for all its assets, Facebook doesn’t appear ready to compete fully against social shopping leaders Groupon and Living Social. Read more »
Facebook and search engine optimization are still useful marketing tools for online startups wanting to build audiences. Let’s examine how a startup making consumer apps or online services can get that much-coveted first million or two users as cheaply as possible. Read more »
SCVNGR is applying game mechanics and a new business model to daily deals in an attempt to strengthen the relationship between merchants and their customers. With LevelUp, merchants offer a series of three deals to consumers, who unlock each one as they try out a business. Read more »
Microsoft, like its rival Google, sees dollars in daily deals. The company today announced Bing Deals, which integrates daily discount information from The Dealmap into its Bing mobile and desktop sites. The idea puts Microsoft into the same game as Groupon and Living Social. Read more »
The New York Times is expected to launch a service soon called TimesLimited, which appears to be a Groupon-style email marketing platform. Since they have such close relationships with advertisers already, why didn’t newspapers like the NYT come up with this idea before Groupon did? Read more »
